The brass alloys CuZn10 and CuZn37 were cold deformed by uniaxial compression in steps of 5% res. 10% to 20%. Using X-ray synchrotron radiation d versus sin(2)psi-distributions were measured. All diagrams showed strong non-linearities which were furthermore different for different hkl. The amplitudes of the oscillations increase with increasing deformation but come to a saturation, for CuZn37 at approximately 10% compression, for instance. The development of the hkl-dependent residual stresses and the oscillations could be related to different microstructures induced by cold deformation. The Voigt-model suits well to describe the oscillations in d-sin(2)psi curves associated with the hot extrusion process which was used for the fabrication of the samples. Moreover, it is shown that additional information obtained from TEM and X-ray line profile analysis is necessary to reproduce the experimental oscillations of d versus sin(2)psi-distributions measured in cold deformed samples.